Hidden Beauty
by Kurukami
Summary: Why did Luke choose a geode, of all things, to give to Grace? Why did Grace see in Luke something that she needed? Set around the events of "Silence". Reviews welcome. New chapter uploaded Nov 10. Complete!
1. It's a Rock

**Title:** Hidden Beauty  
**Author**: Kurukami  
**Feedback**: Very much wanted.  
**Category**: Drama.  
**Distribution**: Please do not distribute or archive without permission.  
**Disclaimer**: Barbara Hall is the creator of "Joan of Arcadia" and CBS owns it. I own nothing of importance in this matter. Please don't sue me, I'm broke enough as it is. : )

**Author's note:** Spoilers up through "Silence".

* * *

Luke had always been gifted with a mind of surprising clarity and recall. Ask him to recite Newton's laws of motion and their ramifications on the progress of science, and he'll ably rattle off a five-minute explanation. Demand of him a logical progression from hypothesis to conclusion, and he'll outline it with bullet points for your benefit. But lying in bed at home late that May night with Mom and Dad away at the hospital with Joan after her collapse, the events of the past hours tangled in his mind like a skein of yarn fallen from its reel, looping back on each other in an endless jumble of thoughts and emotions and experiences.

"_Why did you give me that rock?" she had asked impatiently._

"_It's a geode."_

"_To me it's a rock. Why?" Curiosity hid behind the impersonal gaze she turned on the world at large._

"_It was a, a gesture of ... friendship." He stumbled over his reply, hesitating, unsure. "Possibly courtship."_

He remembered the glare in Grace's blue-grey eyes when she'd first asked her question, that confrontational stare that she turned on virtually everyone. Remembered the doubting words she'd offered him in response to his confession, the half-cynical, half-joking expression on her face, the disbelieving smile, the shell of disdain she'd summoned to the fore against his impertinent questions.

He remembered voicing his arguments to her, overriding her protests that it was ridiculous, that she was Joan's friend, that she was older than him, that she was "anti." How she grew more nervous and uncomfortable as he put forth his logical and scientific arguments against her disbelief, arguments to try to rationalize something he'd felt for months, something that he couldn't quantify with all the knowledge at his command. Remembered her glancing away but always looking back into his eyes, and her getting angrier the longer he had babbled. He remembered how he couldn't stop speaking, couldn't stop pouring his feelings out, and remembered her vehement declaration that she wasn't into him.

And he remembered how in the next moment she'd reached out to embrace him, the way her lips had seemed molten against his, the line of her jaw under his hand, the clean soap-scent of her cheek, the cool black slickness of her leather-jacketed arms wrapped around his shoulders as they kissed.

Hours later, he still felt as though he'd never sleep again, the energy that had crackled between them in the endless, dizzying minutes of that kiss still coursing through his body.

But for all his semi-coherent explanations as to why he'd given it to her, he'd never really told her why he had given her _that_ as a gift. He wasn't entirely sure he could quantify it in sentences, provable evidence, logical progressions. It had been... a hunch. Intuition. The kind of thing that science discounted under normal circumstances.

He had seen the geode only in passing in a storefront down at the mall, the day after he broke up with Glynis, while on his way to meet Friedman at the arcade. On most days he'd have hardly given that display window a second glance. His primary interests lay in exploring the boundaries of theoretical physics or experimenting with reagents and compounds, rather than digging in the earth for long-hidden mysteries. But that day, he'd collided with some brown-haired guy in a corduroy coat and blue jeans coming out of the bookstore across the way, scattering the guy's books all over the manufactured wood floor. It only seemed polite to help him pick them up. The guy had thanked him, and walked off, and when Luke re-shouldered his pack and looked up his eyes had inexplicably been drawn to the geode in the store's window.

Geodes weren't extraordinarily rare, but each was unique in composition. Something about this one simply caught his attention -- polished, hard, greyish stone exterior, hiding an air bubble where glimmering beauty had been sheltered through long years of chthonic heat and pressure. Intuitively, but for no reason he could put words to, his thoughts immediately jumped to Grace – the drab, harsh exterior she offered to the public, the shield of her cynicism and standoffishness disguising her intelligence and fiery spirit. He'd bought the geode impulsively, despite it taking most of the money in his wallet, somehow _knowing_ that it was meant for Grace, and tried to put aside his fears of embarrassment for a core of certainty he could scarcely understand.

He tried to explain it, to himself and to her, both then and now. He remembered fumbling with explanations before he'd wordlessly given it to her one afternoon in the cafeteria, as they studied together for Lischak's chem final. He couldn't find the phrases that would logically explain it, take him from hypothesis to proof, why he'd simply _known_ that it was meant for her. It was something that he had to take on faith, something with the most meager of rational foundations – a state of events that, only a few days earlier, he might've discarded as meaningless or paradoxical.

_Not everything is about science._ Kevin's words from months ago, suddenly given new meaning. _Relationships that work don't always make sense._ Mom's words, just a few short days ago.

Feeling the ghostly memory of Grace's lips on his, he dreamt of the beauty he had found inside the cold, hard shell she showed the world.


	2. Falling from Grace

**Title:** Hidden Beauty (chapter 2 - Falling from Grace)  
**Author**: Kurukami  
**Feedback**: Very much wanted.  
**Category**: Angst/romance.  
**Distribution**: Please do not distribute or archive without permission.  
**Disclaimer**: Barbara Hall is the creator of "Joan of Arcadia" and CBS owns it. I own nothing of importance in this matter. Please don't sue me; I'm broke enough as it is. : )

**Author's note:** Spoilers up through "The Election" (2.05).

It definitely wasn't the aftershave.

What _was_ it with guys, anyways? Did they really think that clogging everyone's sense of smell with that kind of cloying stench made them that much more desirable? And the ridiculously corporatist ads the odor companies used to try and pimp their product – "_Smells Like a Man!_" They never bothered to mention _which_ man – could be Slappy the Bait-Fish Guy for all anyone knew.

It was _so_ not the aftershave.

But … what _was_ it, then?

The light of the stars overhead was drowning in the streetlights' harsh, buzzing glare as Grace Polk hiked up the sloping suburban street in her steel-toed army boots. Her ears were filled with Nick Drake's _Cello Song_, her body was thrumming with nervous energy, and her mind was overflowing with random reactions and recollections -- w_ould I even have noticed the stars if he hadn't mentioned it earlier?_ She tried to fix her thoughts on stillness, push all the mixed-up emotions away and just live in the moment like she usually did, but all the images and remembered sensations kept trickling back in. Trying to push them out of her mind was like trying to empty a lake by splashing in it.

_Start at the beginning. If I can run through it all the way it happened, hows and whens and whys, organize it into neat little categories, maybe it'll somehow make more sense than the jumbled, chaotic mess it is now. Joy and despair and passion and fright and curiosity and anger and –_

_Enough. Start at the beginning._

That morning, in the wake of Joan's decision to go give herself to Rove, Grace had at first gently teased Girardi in her usual sardonic manner before noticing how pale and wobbly the other girl looked – as though a stiff breeze would make her topple over. Grace had eyed her more concernedly then, particularly after Rove had brushed past in the opposite direction. She saw Girardi's ashen features and her trembling hands as Rove beelined for the library and actually wondered for an instant if… _no, no way. Rove would never do anything to cause something like this to her, it's just not in him. Not even after she smashed his art that one time. Besides, she looks more like she's got Bolivian death flu than a broken heart._ But walking away from Friedman's piggish innuendoes, it felt like Joan had actually been leaning against her for support, as though the floor was going to slip out from under her at any moment. Her shoulders through the material of her shirt had felt noticeably hot against Grace's arm.

_I thought I'd just keep an eye on her the rest of the day. Girardi looked so out of it, but I didn't think it was anything worse than a flu bug._ Grace had stuck close to her throughout the remaining hours before the lunch festival, trying to be surreptitious and blasé about the whole situation but feeling more and more uneasy as Joan began looking worse and worse. The pair of them had bumped into Luke as they left the main office, where Grace had steered Joan after the morning charade of classes had let out. Girardi's mom was strangely AWOL, off on some unknown errand. _Typical, how those running the system can get away with stunts like that while sticking us in here to be spoon-fed the "proper" version of education._

_I remember thinking that maybe she'd feel better with some sunlight and fresh air._ She'd led the two Girardis outside, made her usual deprecatory comments about the events of the festival, but her heart just wasn't in it. Joan's condition was starting to seriously spook her, what with obsessive scratching joining the flu-like symptoms that were all too plain in Joan's appearance. Price had ambushed them out on the front lawn, surprisingly mellow for all that his hair and face were drenched from hurled water balloons. Grace had scoffed at his invitation to take part in the spoon race out of habit, and only half-heard Luke's five-dollar-word response. She'd glanced at him briefly before turning back towards Joan and…

_It was… like she wasn't even there for a second. Not the normal Girardi flakiness of not paying attention, but statue-still, looking at empty air, head cocked to one side like the dog in that old RCA-Victor logo. What was that called? "His Master's Voice"?_

And then, despite looking worse than some strung-out junkie three days past her last fix, Joan had immediately jumped in to accept Price's less-than-convincing recruitment spiel as though it was some kind of sacred duty she had to adhere to.

_"This is alarming." I can't believe that's all I could manage to say. I should've… stopped her, maybe, somehow. Told Price that Girardi was feeling under the weather, made up some stupid, preposterous excuse._ But she hadn't done anything. Maybe it was hope sneaking in, hope that Joan wasn't feeling as bad as she looked, that being outside was actually granting her a bit of a recovery. _I should've known better._ Grace had hesitated, promising herself that she'd step in if Joan's condition went south, and began working her way towards the race's sidelines. Luke trailed behind her, rambling off on some esoteric scientific tangent as she cut through the milling crowd, but she mostly ignored him – pushing what had been mildly intriguing just a few moments ago to the back of her mind.

Intent on getting to where she could keep an eye on what was going on, she'd had her neck craned over to one side in an attempt to spot Joan through the crowd and literally run into someone coming from the other direction. The side of her head banged hard against the other person's jawline, dizzying her, and instinctively she had almost shoved the person away, hard, before she recognized Rove.

"Hey, is that Jane? What's going—" he began, rubbing his jaw.

Grace had cut him off. "Later. Girardi looks like she caught anthrax or something. Come on." She'd spun to push through the crowd, chastising herself for the delay and her own clumsiness, when something half-noticed impinged on her train of thought. _Wait a second… _The expression on Luke's face as he stared at Rove had been nearly… furious? But that wasn't anything like him; he was almost always calm and collected. She had half-turned back toward them, then pushed her initial reaction down. _Deal with the testosterone poisoning later. Joan comes first._

At the starting line, Price looked eager, vibrant, like a hound straining at a huntsman's leash, while Joan had clutched at the spoon with both hands, swaying visibly, with her dark hair hanging lank around her face like a funereal shroud. Grace remembered thinking, _Fuck waiting. She looks like death warmed over; I'm pulling her out before she gets worse._ But before she could intercede, the starting gun had sounded and the competitors surged forward.

Price had tried to lead the stumbling Joan across the broad green expanse of lawn towards the finish line. But halfway there Girardi glanced suddenly to her right, towards the line of spectators, seemingly confused, muttering words Grace couldn't quite make out and motioning frantically with one hand. When that had happened, Price had actually seemed _concerned_ for once, slowing down and turning to query Joan with a sympathetic look on his face, and then she… she…

Grace forced herself to remember. _Joan had whipped back around to stare at him, and her face was filled with confusion and fright. She'd tried to back away, panicking, gesturing at Price and all around, babbling about the devil and knowing he was bad and other, less coherent fragments. In her struggles, the ribbon binding her leg to Price's came undone, and she'd drunkenly wobbled a few steps away from him, trying to look everywhere at once, pale face clammy with sweat. She dropped the egg off the spoon she was still holding, and as the shell broke on the hard ground she'd turned towards me and Adam and Luke, her expression lost and terrified and pleading, and her eyes rolled up in her head as she fell over backwards and didn't move again._

_And I was frozen in shock, unable to do anything._

It had been like a nightmare, like… her mind had flashed helplessly back to coming down the stairs with Becky after the sleepover, and finding her mother slumped in a pool of vomit on the kitchen floor next to an empty vodka bottle. Grace's limbs wouldn't move, transfixed by what was going on right in front of her, seeing Joan falling again and again, as Adam and Luke rushed forward, as they and Price huddled around Joan's crumpled form, as Price ordered Adam to call 911 and interrogated Luke as to where his mother was, as Price lifted Joan's limp body effortlessly in his arms, his face filled with concern as he ran with her towards the school, towards the nurse's office, while Grace had been unable to speak or move or even think straight.

Price, who she'd always denigrated as being nothing but a rules-mongering fascist, who she'd always thought was intent only on enforcing order in his tidy little world. Price, who had acted to do the right thing while she stood by, paralyzed. It had shaken Grace deeply, seeing a side to him that she'd never thought existed. Only then, as Price had rushed towards the school's doors and Adam was shaking her, asking for her cell phone, had she finally been able to break free of her reverie.

Her memories of the afternoon after that point were blurred, just fragments of a whole that ran together into a mess of sensations and recollections. The siren of the ambulance blaring. The feverish heat of Joan's hand, limp in Grace's own, damp and sticky with sweat. Her eyes focusing on the rise and fall of Joan's chest, willing Girardi to keep breathing, praying to some entity she wasn't even sure she believed in. The terrible sight of Joan laid down across a gurney, being taken away through swinging doors as Grace's stomach tied itself in knots. Talking to some black doctor in blue scrubs with close-cropped dark hair, a goatee, and kindly eyes, listening to him ask questions about what had happened, and regaining some measure of emotional balance as she spoke. Seeing Adam come through the doors, looking like he was about to throw up, followed a few minutes later by Luke and his wheelchair-bound older brother. Hiding her emotions behind the familiar mask of sarcasm and sharp words. Attempting the unfamiliar task of mediating conflicts that had jumped into the foreground with Joan's collapse.

_"Primates! We are here for Joan. A little restraint."_

Girardi's parents were nowhere to be found. Hours dragged past with interminable sluggishness, with the uncomfortable silence occasionally broken by short discussions. More than once, Grace tried to put on her headphones and bury the emotions she felt beneath drumbeats and guitar chords. Each time she tried she found no solace in the notes and words. The worry that still gnawed at her left no room for the sanctuary she usually found in music.Around four-thirty, Girardi's mom and dad had finally arrived, and the female doctor in charge of the case had ventured out with the results of the blood tests and Joan's diagnosis. "Lyme disease, caused by a tick bite. It could have been lying dormant in her system for a long time. The rash on her leg gave it away…"

_The rash. Of course. Why wasn't I paying attention? It was right there in front of me, staring me in the face, but I pushed my worries away._ Lost in her self-recriminations, Grace had missed a few sentences as the medico went on. "… it manifests in subtle ways at first. Moodiness, extreme changes in behavior…"

Luke chipped in with a snide comment, and Grace favored him with a glare as the doctor continued. "… but later on it becomes more serious. Scattered thinking, lack of concentration, and eventually aural, even visual, hallucinations. Sometimes people are misdiagnosed as being mentally ill."

"This is clearing up a lot for me," Grace had said, thinking out loud. Girardi, always sort of flaky, had been even more so the past few months. More _everything_ – more impulsive, more emotional, more likely to go off on some weird mission… who knew what she'd been trying to cope with, all this time? _I should've seen it. I'm always bagging on her for having no radar, and then I miss what's right in front of me for months. Why didn't I see it?_

Grace had shaken herself mentally, pushing down the negative emotions that wanted to boil up. _No. I'm not a medical doctor. There was no way I could've known what those symptoms meant. It wasn't my fault._ But despite that logic, Grace still felt as though she'd been hollowed out by the events of the day. What had happened had forced her to confront things she hadn't been willing to admit to herself – the depth of friendship and emotion that she'd found between herself and Joan, that Grace hadn't allowed herself to feel in years. She'd avoided that closeness for years by being confrontational and rebellious and "anti". Before today, she'd been virtually certain that it was what she wanted – if she let no one close, she didn't have to risk the pain and rejection and loneliness that she'd felt so acutely in the wake of Becky's abrupt departure. _But my closest friend next to Rove could have died today. Suddenly nothing that was once certain feels that way anymore._

As the sun slowly slipped towards the horizon, each of them finally had the opportunity to look in on Joan. She had slipped into a doze, but to Grace's eyes she still looked exhausted and weakened. The energy that usually animated her, the passion and enthusiasm Grace had always seen in Joan's naïve yet optimistic nature, was strangely missing from her sleeping countenance. Joan seemed somehow smaller without it.


	3. Strangeness and Charm

**Title:** Hidden Beauty (chapter 3 – (Strangeness and Charm) )  
**Author**: Kurukami  
**Feedback**: Very much wanted.  
**Category**: Angst/romance.  
**Distribution**: Please do not distribute or archive without permission.  
**Disclaimer**: Barbara Hall is the creator of "Joan of Arcadia" and CBS owns it. I own nothing of importance in this matter. Please don't sue me; I'm broke enough as it is. : )

**Author's note:** Spoilers up through "The Election" (2.05).

The cool steel doors of the elevator threw back a murky, distorted reflection of what stood in front of them. Around her, a handful of people stood in the not-quite-stillness that seemed to always dominate trips inside these dismal little hollows. The silence was broken only by the sighs and shuffling of feet and rustling of clothing that groups of strangers made when pushed into close proximity.

Despite being in the midst of a crowd, Grace Polk felt as alone as she'd ever felt in her life.

In the wake of her visit to see Joan in her hospital bed, a numb feeling had come over her. Her limbs felt disconnected and apart from her senses, and the hollow emptiness knotting her belly spoke to a void that she didn't think food would fill. It was as though everything around her had become distanced from what she did, as though the pale girl with dark eyebrows and raggedly cut blonde hair that looked back at her from the elevator doors was just an image on a movie screen.

Adam had chosen to stay with Joan, and though Grace couldn't blame Rove for that she still envied the closeness that had blossomed between he and Girardi in recent weeks. Instead of the three of them allied against whatever the world might throw at them, it was like they had become a pair while she doggedly marched along beside them, feeling more isolated with each couple-y thing they did. Joan's collapse earlier today – had it really been less than eight hours ago? – had only thrown the whole situation into sharp contrast within her mind after the fear for her friend's welfare had ebbed. And she couldn't bring herself to simply push the feelings away, like she had for so many other feelings before. Too much lay between them – trust, respect, joy, memories both pleasant and sad, and fondness for both of the others – for her to be willing to simply give it all up.

The elevator _dinged_ Grace out of the labyrinth of her thoughts as the doors slid aside. The hospital's lobby was virtually deserted this time of night. She stepped out beside the two others who had actually ridden all the way to the ground floor, staring around dispiritedly as they walked away down opposing corridors. Walking outside, past the paired sliding doors that always made her think of spaceship airlocks, the late spring air was crisp on her face as twilight approached.

She didn't want to go home. Not yet. The day had been trying enough without having to be anywhere near her father's calm, accepting apathy or one of her mother's unpredictable, alcohol-induced binge-moods. She needed balance, needed to think, needed to walk and lose herself in music, needed to find a way to lock away the emotions that tightened her throat like a garrote.

Motion caught her attention from the corner of her eye, and she turned. _Oh, great. Atom Boy._ He was leaning down into the window of a decrepit junker of a station wagon that she dimly recognized as his older brother's, making conversation. _Must be nice to have family that actually cares what you think, and where the whole house actually feels like sanctuary instead of just one corner of it._ Luke straightened up, turning back towards her, and as the station wagon pulled away from the curb he moved over towards her, shoulders ever-so-slightly hunched in that perpetual weighed-down posture he always seemed to fall into even when he wasn't hauling around a locker full of textbooks.

"Hey," he said quietly.

"Hey yourself."

"You OK?"

"Of course I am," she said with a frown, and turned away from the hospital to start walking. _Sure you are,_ whispered a voice inside. _Hollow and lonely and head filled up with thoughts of the past instead of the summer ahead, yup, you're grade-A fine, Polk._ Behind her, the sound of sneakers whispered on the asphalt of the parking lot as Girardi scrambled to catch up to her, and they walked together quietly for a short while.

It was strangely … comfortable.

Naturally, the quiet didn't last.

Luke started filling up the quiet with random observations and non-sequiturs, adroitly sidestepping mention of the day's events with a subtlety that she once would've thought beyond him. He spoke of the history of concrete and how Romans were the first to widely use it (which sort of made sense given the sidewalk they were ambling down), and of optics and the refraction of light off varied materials (which kind of tied in as the fading rays of the setting sun shimmered off downtown's buildings), and then veered off on some weird monologue about the properties of subatomic particles (quarks being the foundational elements of all matter and having all manner of bizarrely named "flavors").

Listening to Girardi usually filled Grace with a blend of emotions – curiosity (since he usually had something intriguing on his mind) mixed with impatience (since he took forever to get to most of his points), together with a splash of "huh?" (when his thoughts went off on tangents she'd never even considered) and a sprinkling of inner serenity. She wasn't quite sure how he managed that last bit, given how abrasive she usually felt towards the world. Tonight, though, as the path they were walking under the darkening sky lengthened, letting his words wash over her loosened knots in her shoulders she'd been almost too numb to be aware of. They wandered up streets and through parks and down alleys, as hours passed and the sun's light vanished beyond the western horizon.

Eventually, Luke fell into an awkward silence as they turned left off the boulevard into an alley downtown. Grace glanced at him, a faint smile tugging at her lips and thoughts trickling back from the comfortable mental stillness she'd found as they walked. Her neck and shoulders, so rigid with tension earlier, felt almost fluid now. _Endorphins from the walk? Or … _

_I don't know what it is about him, but somehow I feel like I can relax when I'm near him._ The thought crept unbidden into her mind. She stared off down the stretch of alley between buildings as they walked, considering it. _No. Can't be. He's just some guy. I'm not letting someone get that close to me again. Loneliness is better. Better than a few brief weeks or months of believing that there's comfort and honesty in the world, better than anguish curling in my stomach like broken glass and lasting so much longer._

_But…_ Curiosity teased at her. He actually had taken a stand for her more than once. That time in Lischak's class, a few weeks before Joan had decided to go all Jerry Springer on Rove's sculpture. The brief moments at the semi-formal, overhearing Friedman's insinuations and Luke's quick defense of her. And she still didn't know what exactly he had meant to imply by giving her that rock last week as a gift. So … why not _try_ to talk? She moistened lips dried by the night air, decided to take the indirect approach, and threw her words out towards Girardi like a challenge. "You didn't have to walk with me. You could have gone with your brother."

He seemed almost surprised as she broke the silence. "It seemed ungentlemanly."

"That's not a word."

"Besides, I like walking. Although this is a lot of walking… uh… do you always walk this much?"

She half-smiled, slipping back into the easy rhythm of conversation they'd shared a few times before. "It's how I do my thinking."

"That's why you're so smart."

Her warm mood shattered like a beaker dropped on the chem lab's floor. _Smart? That's like saying someone's 'nice' – just some empty pleasantry that doesn't mean a damned thing._ She glared at him and spat, "I am not '_smart_'."

"Of course not, I, I didn't mean smart, I meant – intelligent. Not the same thing."

_Nice recovery, Atom Boy. _"I like the quiet when I walk," she shot back waspishly, then winced mentally. _Oh sure, Polk, like he'll believe that after he just spent the last hours delivering a doctoral thesis's worth of words without me getting fed up._

"Of course. Which you're, uh, probably missing right now, with me talking." There was a brief pause. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him crane his head skyward. "Stars."

She rolled her eyes. _Not another tangent. What do I have to do, draw him a map with a highlighted route? Do all Girardis lack radar? _"Don't mention them."

"Oh, uh, no, I wasn't going to. You know, it's virtually impossible to see them, even, in the age of light pollution, you know—"

_Apparently they do._ She turned around abruptly to confront him. "Why did you give me that rock?"

"It's a geode."

"To me it's a rock. Why?"

_"_It was a, a gesture of … friendship." He stumbled over his reply, hesitating, unsure. _Friendship. OK. Fine. _"Possibly courtship."

"Courtship?" She scoffed and raised her eyebrows in cynical disbelief, then smiled sardonically. "That went out with the corset or the Walkman or something."

"I don't follow trends."

_Wait a second…_ "Did you break up with Glynis because of me?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

"OK. I won't, because that would be ridiculous. So let's… not go there."

"Right." _Friendship. Fine. I can deal with that._ She turned away to walk home, vaguely disappointed for some reason she couldn't pin down, and then heard the words that spilled out of him. "Why is that ridiculous?"

She turned around to stare back at him. "I'm friends with your sister."

"Right."

"I'm _older_ than you."

"A year. Eight months, actually."

_What do I have to do, bludgeon him with the obvious? Hold up a huge blinking neon sign?_ She stalked back towards him impatiently. "I have a reputation. I worked hard to build it. Do you know what my reputation is?"

"You hate me?"

She blinked, brow furrowing as she stared at him, astonished he could think that. "I'm anti."

"OK. Anti what?"

"What've you got?"

"So you're never going to fall in love."

"I'm never even going to fall in _like_. And I'm certainly not going to be courted by some – " she fumbled momentarily for an appropriate phrase " – rocket-head geek. I mean, if it got around school that you were giving me things – "

He cut into her diatribe without a moment's hesitation. "What do you care what people think? I mean, if you're 'anti' – shouldn't you like the idea of us if you're so 'anti'?"

_Whoa, this is **so** not where I expected this conversation to go._ She stared at him for a moment, seeing the belief in his gaze, then looked away, unable to hold eye contact but trying to hold a strong front against him. "I'm not _that_ anti."

"Oh, so you're moderately anti." His quick, sardonic retort cut through her standoffishness like a cat digging its claws into her leg.

"Look, geek – "

"And besides, you know, love is irrational! It's like this anaesthetic goes off in your brain eliminating all reason so that the act of procreation can occur – "

" – hey, hey – "

"It's a natural state of imbalance built into the whole system, you know? A chemical reaction necessary to the conditions required for Darwinistic evolution – "

"Look, I am not into you! Got it?"

They stared at each other for a long second before he replied, "Yeah."

She confronted him with her gaze, felt the emotions coiling inside her, saw the fervor and certainty in his stare that she'd seen so many times reflected in her bedroom mirror. And suddenly, she didn't want to let this moment go. There was some connection between them, a thread of shared emotion and _need_ that pulled at her and that she didn't want to push away the way she'd done on so many other occasions. It was like seeing a part of herself that she hadn't even known was gone – the innocence and optimism that she'd tried to bury in herself as the years dragged by and disappointments piled up one after the other, matched with the drive and intense feeling that she always kept close.

Her arms reached forward to draw him closer, one hand cupped around the back of his neck and the other around his shoulders, and for a endless, all-too-brief moment she existed only in sensation. The soft touch of his lips against hers, the vulnerability and intimacy and trust of pulling his slender body close, the texture of the thin t-shirt she wore pressed against her belly and breasts by his proximity, the comforting feel of his arms embracing her, the warmth that grew between their bodies in the space of the kiss, the scent of him – shampoo and soap mixed with the distant tang of sweat and the faint fading aroma of aftershave.

It felt like it went on forever, and yet was over all too soon. When they finally broke from the kiss, there was a warmth in the core of her that hadn't been there before and that she couldn't remember feeling in … _years. Has it been that long since I was honestly content even for a brief moment?_

The silence between them lengthened as she looked at him smiling at her. Finally, Luke simply murmured, "Wow."

Grace just stood there, arms still around his shoulders, a shy smile tugging at her lips. "Yeah."

She wouldn't let Luke walk her home. That was too much honesty too soon. Memories of Becky's horrified face turning towards the door to escape kept haunting her at the thought of letting someone inside.She walked home with him instead, feeling like she was floating in the aura of energy that still thrummed through her from the closeness they'd shared. Luke gave her his IM number and she told him that she'd message him tomorrow. She shared a brief kiss with him (after a nervous glance around to see that no-one was watching), and then she walked away from him across the smooth sidewalk.

Strangeness and charm. That was one of the tangents Luke had gone off on earlier – something about flavors of quarks or some other bizarre, nonsensical topic. Most of the time she didn't understand half of what he said. For some reason, though, that pair of words lingered in her mind. Together they seemed to exemplify quite a bit of why she'd suddenly felt compelled to reach out to him, pull him into her arms, kiss him. It wasn't that she was some bubble-headed twit whose inner thighs went warm at the thought of a pretty face; she'd always held herself above that. It _so_ wasn't the aftershave; she wrinkled her nose just at the memory of the more pungent stinks he'd used to slather on. It wasn't the intelligence that burned in him like a magnesium flare, despite the appeal of someone who could string three words together coherently. It wasn't his blond hair, or the line of his jaw, or the lean slender shoulders, or his semi-androgynous not yet peach-fuzzed features.

Maybe it was his eyes, holding the same certainty hers had. That, combined with the intensity of emotion, standing up for something and arguing his opinion despite all the arguments presented against it, but still possessing that innocent charm that she could barely find in herself anymore.

Strangeness and charm.

A smile tugged at the edge of her mouth as Nick Drake wound down and she topped the slope of the hill, turning back to look at the route she'd walked this long evening. In the darkness of night, streetlamps cast pools of illumination against the black, the modern-day pale imitation of the warmth and comfort of the sun.

Her parents' house was only a block away. Shelter against the night wind that was already sliding chill fingers inside her jacket. A promise, however thin and meaningless experience had proven it to be, of warmth and comfort. Grace slowly walked forward, the energy that had filled her stride earlier dissipating. Tonight, like all too many nights before, she didn't want to go home. Didn't want to entomb herself back in that atmosphere of deception and apathy, hypocrisy and weak-willed acceptance of what was. Pale imitations of real emotion, of warmth and comfort.

She blinked, shaking herself free of her thoughts, and looked up to find herself on the sidewalk in front of her house. Her father's car was pulled up into the driveway, but most of the lights were off. Maybe they'd gotten her phone message about Joan, maybe not. Grace couldn't find it in herself to particularly care whether they were worried.

She slipped in through the door as quiet as she could. A quick glance around confirmed there were no parental units waiting in ambush, ready to heap guilt on her for her so-called shortcomings. She slid across the darkened living room like a shadow, stopped at the foot of the stairs, and saw her mother quietly sitting in the kitchen counter with a bottle and a half-empty glass. _So. Nothing changes. I wonder if she even noticed I was gone?_

Grace went up the stairs in silence, hearing the television droning softly in her parents' bedroom, and locked herself inside her room. The yellow walls, layered with posters and slogans and signs salvaged from junkpiles, were comfortable. Familiar. But tonight… tonight they didn't fill her with the same feeling of sanctuary that they usually did. The sound of the television still buzzed dimly through her bedroom door, and she pulled on her headphones to drown it out with her own rhythms.

The music helped somewhat, led her back towards that balance and sense of comfort she'd felt earlier that evening. She peeled off her boots, hung up her jacket, and leaned cross-legged against the bed's headboard, letting her eyes drift upwards and away from the chaotic mess that her corner of the house always seemed to gather up. Inside, she reached for the memories of the evening, trying to get back to that place within herself that could understand optimism and hope and comfort.

Feeling the ghostly memory of Luke's lips on hers, she dreamt of the serenity she had found in those moments, and for the first time in a long while felt as though she'd come home.


End file.
